Friday, June 04, 2010

Towards ignoring the questions

Why does Hashem make us feel the questions if he's not going to give us any answers? - Larry Gopnik

We can distinguish between a craving for chocolate, say, and a craving for bread. A craving for water and one for wine--or indeed one for beer rather than wine. That is to say, a person does not simply crave food or drink or sleep, but a very particular set of things and circumstances, sometimes one and not the other, and often without any absolute physical need of them.

Why not then a craving for God?--as often, say, we crave the company of a particular friend and not just anybody? Or our mother rather than that friend? What person hasn't had the experience--however inexplicably--that only that person will do? Only they offer the comfort or nourishment that we need? Why then is it so hard to accept a need for this thing we knowto be God? Why is the craving for Chinese food not also ludicrous?

"The levelling demands of a generous democratic inspiration have been changed from aspirations and ideals into appetites and unconscious assumptions."

- José Ortega Y Gasset

"Strange to think of you, strange now to hear your voices through the ether coming from a world so long since barred to us! I miss you, miss you even though you were opponents of mine and politically on the other side - oh, believe me, finally it is the lack of all opposition and any dissension whatsoever, and the deadly monotony that results that makes life here so unbearable."

- Friedrich Percyval Reck- Malleczewen

"It is only the sentimentalist who imagines that the profundity of a person's response to tragedy is proportional to the length, volume or shrillness of his lamentation."

- Theodore Dalrymple

"Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy."

- Roger Scruton

"A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides ... the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires."

- Edmund Burke

"The current muddle between subjectivism about morals and dogmatism about rights, for example, merely conceals the semantic changes by which the moral is being transposed into the manipulable, leading to a gullible acquiescence in the projects of governments."

- Kenneth Minogue

"In Toronto, it appears, one may leer desirously at underdressed girls, or gape at them with the costive expression of one who considers Nudity and Art to be synonymous terms, but one must not laugh."

- Samuel Marchbanks

"Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity."